


nothing left to say

by drizzly_bear



Category: The Prom - Sklar/Beguelin/Martin
Genre: Bullying, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Pre-Canon, Sad, emma loses all her friends in canon, i don't understand what order ao3 is putting these tags in, she's so sad, she's so strong, that must have been so hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 05:11:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18218654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drizzly_bear/pseuds/drizzly_bear
Summary: loneliness bows the spine and slumps the shoulders. loneliness is a tangible thing, and Emma knows this.





	nothing left to say

 

 

_There’s nothing left to say now_  
_There’s nothing left to say now_

_I’m giving up, giving up_  
_giving up now_  
_I’m giving up, giving up_  
_giving up now_   

  

 

* * *

 

Innocence is a wonderful thing.

Childhood is defined by blissful naivety, and Emma misses her childhood. She is still young, but most days she feels so jaded that it’s hard to think of herself as anything fresh and immature. She is like the withered apple left on the branch after the harvest; the half-drunk drinks at a party where everyone has moved on; the lone playbill damp and disillusioned, blown along a darkened street by a listless wind, bright illustrations crushed by heavy footprints.

  
When Emma is 11, she has a tight-knit group of friends. They sit together in breaks at school, swapping stories and sharing juice boxes. When Emma makes a joke, people laugh with her. They read the same books and watch the same movies and TV shows. They fall in and out of love with the same songs, together. When Emma gets glasses, everyone teases her until she blushes, then everyone reassures her that she looks great. They wait in breathless anticipation for their Hogwarts letters, and have a slumber party instead when the letters don’t come. At Hallowe’en, they trick-or-treat together wearing matching Hogwarts robes.

  
When Emma is 12, they all go to the middle school dance together, a laughing group driven by their parents. It is only the school gym, but it feels so much more special. Here they were at school, at night. They are allowed to stay out past their usual curfew. A group of them venture through the hallways, voices and steps echoing. They chase each other around the darkened classrooms and corridors, relishing the feeling of pre-teen rebellion. When they return to the gym, they split off into couples to dance and Emma stands alone in the entrance a moment, feeling slightly lost. But then a faster song plays and she is beckoned into the crowd, and all is right once again. At Hallowe’en that year, everyone dresses as footballers or cheerleaders, and Emma as the Ninth Doctor feels a little out of place.

  
When Emma is 13, they move into high school and are the youngest once more. The dynamic of their group shifts just ever-so-slightly, and though everything continues as normal, Emma feels a step out of sync from everyone else. Kaylee and Shelby join the cheerleading squad. Nick is picked for the junior varsity team. At sleepovers with the other girls, everyone talks about their favorite celebrities and they look at Emma oddly when she says she loves Emma Watson. Next time, Emma instead talks about David Tennant while Kaylee paints her toenails, and tries to listen attentively as the others discuss the merits of various Chris’s. Shelby and Kaylee start to wear makeup and buy enough new outfits to fill their wardrobes to overflowing. Emma doesn’t; she is most comfortable in her faded jeans and worn jackets. Emma goes trick-or-treating as the Tenth Doctor, loving the trench coat and beat-up Converse she found. Her friends are Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America. Her friends are Black Widow, Catwoman, Batwoman.

  
When Emma is 14, she makes a joke while they eat lunch and it goes unheard. Later, Mandy repeats the joke to broad amusement. Emma begins to feel like a background character. She has civics with Kevin and Kaylee, and when the two of them take a desk together, Emma quietly sits down behind them, forgotten. She goes shopping with the girls and every outfit they put her in feels wrong. When Emma asks them how they feel about the new season of Doctor Who, they tell her they stopped watching it ages ago. Emma finds a website called archiveofourown and becomes oddly engrossed in Drarry and Wolfstar fanfiction, burying herself in the words as her friends talk around (but never to) her. She becomes an expert in quickly closing the browser window whenever anyone walks past behind her. One night as they are all hanging out, they decide to start a band and Emma learns the guitar. But they can’t decide on what songs to play – the girls want Taylor Swift and the boys would rather die. Emma wants to play Panic! at the Disco, but keeps that to herself. When Hallowe’en comes around, Emma raises her chin and ties her bow tie to become the Eleventh Doctor, and does not look down, even when she meets the others and they’re all dressed as the characters from _Mean Girls_. Afterwards, she sees on Instagram that her friends had gone to a party at Greg’s house after trick-or-treating that night. Alone in her bedroom, rewatching _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ for the tenth time, Emma tells herself that she wouldn’t have wanted to go anyways.

  
When Emma is 15, she discovers Hayley Kiyoko and Tegan and Sara. She watches everything in the LGBTQ category of Netflix. She cuts her hair short and buys some plaid shirts from a secondhand store. At school, she begins to hear whispered comments behind her back and does her best to ignore them, even when graffiti with her name on it begins to appear on bathroom walls. One day as she walks to school with her headphones on, she sees Nick drive past with Shelby, Kaylee, and Kevin in the car with them. They are laughing, and they do not see her. Another day, she walks into the canteen to find that their table is full, her usual spot taken by a cheerleader named Alyssa Greene. She makes eye contact with Shelby, who looks away. Shaken, Emma eats lunch alone that day. She eats lunch alone every day after that, too. When she texts her friends, asking if they want to see a movie or hang out, no one replies. When she sees her friends in the corridors, she says hello, but they never seem to hear her. She isn't ever removed from their group chat, but eventually, she leaves it herself. No one ever replies to her messages there either. Emma screws up the courage to visit their lunch table and ask what she did wrong, but she is met with blank stares and silence, silence, silence. When Emma discovers the unused band closet, she feels endlessly relieved. That year, Emma looks at the Twelfth Doctor costume she had lovingly put together and reflects on the Emma of few months prior, who had been so excited to wear that battered suit. This Emma doesn’t go trick-or-treating, and leaves the costume in the closet to gather dust.

 

When Emma is 16, she sits down with her parents at the dinner table and tells them that she is a lesbian. She is met with an awful silence that's worse than anything she could ever have imagined. The next day, she packs two duffel bags with some of her belongings and goes to visit her grandmother. Emma never returns home. Betsy is the only person she can talk to, the only person who still looks at her the same way anymore. It is not enough. Emma is exhausted. Each and every day is an uphill climb, a fight through the stillness that surrounds her. Each day it grows harder and harder to hold her chin up and bite back at her once-friends, who have moved from silently snubbing her to openly disdaining her. She sits alone in class, head down. Some days she wants to grab Kaylee by the shoulders and shake her until she sees that Emma is still Emma. Some days she wants to hit everyone that looks at her. Some days she wonders if she should have tried harder, talked to her friends and gotten them to accept her. Some days she spends all her energy pushing down tears. Some days she thinks that they might be right about her aberration, and thinks about how to fix herself. Some days, Emma knows that she has done nothing wrong, that it can and will and must get better, and she prays that she is worthy of love. Most days, she cannot force herself to believe that anyone would ever want to talk to her.

  
And Emma begins to believe that her heart is too tired to ever trust again.

 

(She's wrong, but she doesn't know that yet.) 

 

* * *

 

_Where do we go from here?_  
_I threw some rocks up at your window_  
_I broke some rocks right through your window._

**Author's Note:**

> title and lyrics taken from "Nothing Left To Say/Rocks" by Imagine Dragons


End file.
